One of the most persistent characteristics of the geography of Britain is the wide inequality that exists between its constituent regions. It is an inequality which has come to be known as the North-South divide, but this is a gestural term that refers to a geography which has in fact varied in detail and in form over at least the last two centuries. In the present period, in spite of many stated intentions and much government rhetoric to the contrary, it has on many measures grown considerably worse. Our argument in this paper is that it will continue to do so unless there is a more serious engagement with the power dynamics that underlie this fundamentally unequal and undemocratic geography: dynamics that continue to return London and the South East as the centre of the nation. A reversal of this situation demands a good degree of radical thinking and political courage.
We want to begin the fight against the spatial assumptions of most current thinking about the British polity, assumptions that are so familiar that they are hardly debated at all. One assumption we want to fight against is that London is the fount of all things ‘political’. Lots of commentators have, of course, wanted to argue that the United Kingdom is rabidly London-centric. But these same commentators then demonstrate how mired they are in a certain way of thinking by simply replacing a state containing a powerful central space that does most of the politics with a whole series of clones: little states with their own centres and political goodies – and their own peripheries. Second, we want to fight against that other opposing point of view, the assumption that the solution to this state of affairs is local democracy. We do not believe that ‘local’ is automatically a good thing, not only because modern British society is now threaded through with all kinds of politics operating at all kinds of scales but also because not only can local politics be just as mean-spirited as any other kinds of political activity but also such localism makes much more difficult any attempt at serious redistribution between places. At worst, it can lead simply to inter-local competition. Third, as by now we hope is becoming clear, we want to fight against the idea that politics has to be territorially bounded. Rather, we are interested in spaces of relation in which all kinds of unlike things can knock up against each other in all kinds of ways.
One way to state our position is to say that we are interested in a mobile politics. But even this does not quite capture it. Rather, we are interested in critiquing a certain kind of mobility – the one which always passes through the capital, both in thought and deed. Just as the transport system, and so many other systems too, seem automatically to head for London, so the kind of mobility which we want to criticize also thinks that there is no other way of being. We want, then, to write about a different kind of mobility, one which doesn’t have London as its head. We want to move on into a world in which centres are no longer quite so important because political power has been not so much devolved (which still assumes the presence of a centre) as dispersed (which does not).
Two particular threads of change are important to this reimagination of a mobile politics. One is the issue of the very conceptualisation of regions and “the regional question” in an era of increasingly geographically extended spatial flows and an intellectual context where space is frequently being imagined as a product of networks and relations, in contrast to an older topography in which territoriality was dominant. This raises huge questions: of what “the region” can mean in such an era and such a space; and of the relation both between regions and between the regional and the national and international. A relational understanding of space poses challenges both to the analysis of the causes of regional inequality and to the design of measures to combat it. Can one construct a relational politics to address a relational space? And how might that resonate with any proposed regionalisation of England, or regional devolution?
The other thread is that while the claims for regional devolution have already linked the economic with the political, it is evident that the UK in general, and England specifically, still have highly centralised geographies of power. There is such an integral relation between inequalities of power and economy, and the construction of the national space, that we would question whether regional devolution, as currently proposed, will make any serious in-roads into the nationally centralised geography of power. We firmly believe that issues of regional inequality and what we call the spatial grammar of democracy in Britain are linked to such a degree that more radical action is needed.
However, in arguing against the centrality of London and the South East, we are not making the claim that the whole of this region is wealthy or powerful. Indeed one of our concerns is to address the systematic production of poverty and exclusion within the capital itself. Nor is the notion of “region” meant to signify some kind of bounded territory. It is crucial to our argument that “space” (the national, and international, geography) is understood in terms of flows and interconnections, as well as boundaries. Thus “the South East”, as we would argue is any region, is a nexus of relations and connections, changing its geography over time as those relations change, and changing its distinctiveness too (ref: Rethinking the Region). For the moment let us say that something called “the South East” in our meaning of that term stretches discontinuously between extremities in Cambridge in the east and Bristol in the west and that, although there is no single coherent “regional economy”, there is much which ties it together, even in its openness. Those things which it shares include above all the central dynamic of London.
We begin the paper by showing that the London-centrism of the British polity is such an enduring feature that it has now become ingrained as the template for doing politics. The grip of London is so strong that in the first part of the paper we are forced to produce a fairly extensive archaeology of its composition, before we can show the ways in which it continues to return, now, in a different form because of the rise of the mass media of the latter half of the Twentieth century. The resulting inequality is echoed in the way in which the politics of the regions is now conducted. In the second section, which considers the continuing economic power of this metropolitan area, we argue that this region’s grip on various dimensions of national politics and policy contributes significantly to regional inequality in the UK, and also perpetuates huge inequalities within the area itself. In the third section, we show that the various measures which are currently being used to ameliorate some of the most malign effects of regional inequality are largely ineffective because they still assume the centred spatial grammar that is at the root of the regional problem. Since they cannot get beyond that grammar, they cannot get into policy territories which might produce an effective counterweight. So, for example, we argue that contemporary regional policy and institutional reforms such as development agencies and some of the other paraphernalia of economic devolution, are not equal to the task. In the final sections of the paper, we go on to develop a set of alternative proposals that presume neither London-centrism nor devolution. Instead, we make the case for a dispersed polity that has no special centre. The result is that different parts of the country can play equal roles in the conduct of the nation. This involves shipping ‘national’ institutions out of the London region, certainly, but it also means breaking the hold on political thought and action that London currently has, by producing a patchwork of different political mobilities which are able to revalorise the local by bringing it into a new relation with the national. We believe that the measures we outline will benefit not only the regions outside London, but also London itself, by removing so many of the strained political relationships which now characterise political life in the UK, and by improving the general quality of life of the metropolis and its region.
Our stance is therefore quite straightforward. We believe that Britain cannot count itself as a real democracy when different parts of the country have different political weights attached to them. So this state of affairs must change, and this paper outlines how that change can be brought about, bringing say to the many parts of the country which currently have no say.
Contents
1 Introduction
2 Does politics have to be territorially defined?
- 2.1 Towards a politics of circulation
2.1.1 Supplicant political spaces – And how to avoid them
2.1.2 A brief history of British Political Space
3 The Role of London and the South East in Regional Economic inequality 12
- 3.1 Dimensions of London bias
3.2 London and the South East: the most unequal region
3.3 Redistribution yes … but within London
4 A New Regional Policy
- 4.1 New Labour’s new localism
4.2 A regionally sequestered economy?
4.3 A new regional policy framework
5 A dispersed polity
- 5.1 Rethinking devolution
5.2.1 A constrained democracy
5.2.2 A mobile regional heritage
6 Conclusion
References
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The regional problem and the Spatial Grammar of British Politics
